Wednesday, March 25, 2015

At this week's OFC exhibition in Los Angeles, the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is showcasing the first electrical interfaces running at 56 Gbps, effectively doubling the current 28G electical interface specification. The OIF has five CEI-56G specifications are under development, such as platform backplanes and links between a chip and an optical engine on a line card.

To address power consumption issues, the OIF is pursuing two parallel tracks: using 56 Gigabit non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signalling and 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) which encodes two bits per symbol such that a 28 Gbaud signalling rate can be used. The 56 Gig NRZ uses simpler signalling but must deal with the higher associated loss, while PAM-4 does not suffer the same loss as it is similar to existing CEI-28 channels used today but requires a more complex design.

CommScope demonstrated 100 Gbps Ethernet applications using short wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM) over wide band multimode fiber (WBMMF). The technology is targeted at high bandwidth applications in high-performance data centers. The demonstration at this week's OFC in Los Angeles was held in partnership with Finisar, which supplied the 100G transceivers for use with the CommScope LazrSPEED 550 WideBand multimode fiber.

“We have been working with our partners on advancing the capabilities of high-speed transmission over multimode fiber and we believe this demonstration will show how far we have come in providing another cost-effective solution to support future data center needs,” said Kevin St. Cyr, senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions, CommScope. “The LazrSPEED WideBand multimode fiber will enable migration from 10 to 40 to even 100 Gigabit speeds over a single fiber pair, as well as provide customers legacy support for existing applications.”

Ciena has joined the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project that supports "at scale" research in networking, distributed systems, cloud services, security, and novel applications.

GENI provides access to hundreds of widely distributed resources, including virtual machines and “bare-machines.” The company said that by connecting GENI’s multi-site cloud computing resources with its testbed, its researchers’ gain greater ability to collaborate with external researchers via a multi-directional interconnected system to test new applications on a large scale network and give assurance of their real-world viability. For example, this can be used to test new network function virtualization (NFV) applications like virtual WAN optimization or network security.

“Ciena’s collaboration with the National Science Foundation’s GENI project will help drive continued exploration of advanced network enabled applications and support the creation of more programmable, agile networks that are essential in today’s web-scale world,” stated Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research, Ciena.

Harmonic introduced the first single-rack, multiformat, integrated receiver-decoder (IRD), transcoder and MPEG stream processor to support the HEVC standard, enabling video content and service providers to decode HEVC compressed streams up to 1080p60 resolution.

The 1-RU chassis ProView 7100 IRD platform offers broadcast-quality SD/HD MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC decoding, in addition to MPEG-2 and AVC transcoding. It supports AVC HD and HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit decoding up to 1080p60. The HEVC decoding capabilities are available to new and existing ProView 7100 customers via a simple software update and license key.

"The ability to decode HEVC compressed streams is becoming important for video content and service providers as they prepare to deliver high-quality, bandwidth-intensive services like Ultra HD and 4K," said Bart Spriester, senior vice president, video products, Harmonic. "As the world's first IRD platform capable of decoding HEVC content, the ProView 7100 continues to prove that it's the best solution for content reception applications, providing TV operators with the flexibility, scalability, video compression efficiency and low total-cost-of-ownership they need to cost-effectively deliver video offerings with amazing quality now and in the future."

At this week's #OFC2015 in Los Angeles, Luxtera confirmed commercial availability of its 100G-PSM4 compliant chipset and QSFP optical module. The company said its low cost single mode products make it well positioned for an industry-shift from copper and legacy multimode fiber to single mode fiber at volume scale.

FEC not required for error free operation but also supports Clause 74 and 91 FEC

1310nm PSM4 MSA compliant – as described by www.psm4.org.

Proven Light Source and Packaging Technology

Extended Reach Up to 2000 Meters

Less than 3.5W worst case power

“In 2015, hyperscale data centers are undergoing a tectonic shift as the industry moves to 100Gb, and single mode photonics replace copper to become the mainstream interconnect. Luxtera is at the forefront of this transition with the only optical transceiver technology that can deliver 100Gb speeds with up to 2km of reach at the aggressive cost points needed for these high volume deployments. Today we are introducing our first Hybrid Silicon Photonics architecture products including the industry’s first 1310nm 100G-PSM4 MSA compliant QSFP28+ pluggable module and a fully integrated SiP PSM4 chipset,” said Greg Young, President and CEO of Luxtera. “Luxtera pioneered the field of Silicon Photonics starting in 2001 and has been in continuous production since the original introduction of 40Gb SiP AOCs in 2008. With these new products we are addressing connectivity needs of hyperscale/cloud and enterprise datacenters with standard compliant products. We look forward to moving further into these core markets by delivering additional high performance single mode fiber solutions."